News of cuts to the Computer Science Department at the University of Florida hit the Web this weekend. Shock and outrage ensued, particularly in tech and education circles, fueled in no small part by the headline of the Forbes story that brought this to most people’s attention: “University of Florida Eliminates Computer Science Department, Increases Athletic Budgets. Hmm..”

The headline is misleading. The university hasn’t “cut computer science completely.” It has substantially gutted the department, true, through a restructuring plan that eliminates the research and graduate programs and teaching assistantships from the Computer and Information Science Department and relocating some staff, faculty and grad students to the Electrical and Computing Engineering Department.

I feel compelled to point out here, with some 12,000 Tweets and 68,000 Facebook “likes” on the story, that Forbes is getting quite good at this sort of click-baiting. (See: “If I Were a Poor Black Kid.”) Bloggers there are paid in part based on pageviews, incidentally.

You can read the rest of the story, which doesn't include this anti-pageview-oriented view of journalism, I promise, over on Inside Higher Ed.

Photo credits:  Flickr user Drregor